Why smut is important to my liberation and yours: … So I typed the phrase “bodice ripper” into Google and found an old Cecilia Tan essay.(Thank goodness, the word does show up in the essay’s last ‘graph.) Care to make something of it?

Feminism for me is about many of the things it was for my mother: having the right to choose what to do with our bodies, fighting rape, fighting stereotypes. But until women are allowed to define within their own minds their own sexual reality and their own sexual fantasies, they will continue to be manipulated sexually by men and dominated by the cultural “norms” of beauty/desirability and behavior. We have to be allowed to have our fantasies, the fantasies that let us escape this oppressive world, the fantasies that let us dream of the utopia that I am trying my damndest to bring about.